As technology continues to grow and evolve, it will continue to find its way into almost every single space, and education is no exception. In this episode, Doctor Awesome sits down with Katrina Stevens, CEO of The Tech Interactive, to talk about the future of science education. They discuss how immersive and interactive technological approaches can make learners more engaged and retain information longer. Katrina explains how to measure the impact of educational technology to refine teaching strategies further and align with how the dopamine reward system is executed. She also shares her thoughts about using long-form podcasts and artificial intelligence as a way to educate children, as well as the potential benefits of hybrid learning setups.

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The Future Of Science Education – A Conversation With Katrina Stevens

Welcome back to The Futurist Society, where we are broadcasting from the present and talking about the future. I’m joined by Katrina Stevens, who is the CEO of The Tech Interactive, as well as a thought leader in the educational technology space. Katrina, nice to meet you. We are talking a little bit about education in the future that pretends for us as a society, something that I’m particularly interested in. Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you get into this position, and what The Tech Interactive means.  

Thank you, Dr. Awesome, for inviting me to your show. This is always fun. I ran The Tech Interactive which was fun, like all the Tech Museum of Innovation. It’s a brick-and-mortar science center in the heart of Silicon Valley. We were designed to inspire the innovator in everyone, and we do a lot of that through play. We also have a STEM education center that serves people from all over the world. All of our programs are designed to create problem solvers locally, nationally, and globally.

I came to this role not directly. I was a classroom teacher for a very long time. I taught English in a location that teaches math classes. As a teacher, all the tools were starting to show up, a lot of the education technology tools. I felt like most of them, if they had talked to a teacher, would be slightly different. I got interested in how these kinds of tools are created. I ended up on the education and technology side, where I was trying to figure out how to get more educator voices in how things were created. I ended up starting a little tech startup and eventually ended up in the Department of Education.

I was in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Director for the Office of Education Technology. There, it was around how to get all the different voices into the technology that we’re using. How do I get the researcher’s voice? How do I get the community voice? How do I make sure that the tools that are getting developed actually work for the people they are intended to work for? That led me to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative where I had a portfolio of about $20 million. I was able to fund projects that were around that. I got recruited to The Tech and fell in love with both being able to do community-based work and being able to take that work to kids around the world.

What are you guys doing in regards to education technology that’s interesting or different at the museum that you’re in charge of?

 

 

One of the things that are hard when you’re developing education technology is to test because you want to be able to have as many kids and teachers as possible and be able to try things out so that you’re tweaking and getting it better and better. If you’re doing that in classrooms, you have to wait a whole another year before you can test on those same kids again. One of the things that we’re able to do at The Tech where we develop our resources is that we have 100,000 students come through every single year. I have an opportunity to be able to try things out in real time and be able to create that development cycle and shorten it by quite a bit. Being able to have a much more diverse group of kids who are influencing what those tools look like.

What does that translate to in regards to things that are working? When you test 100,000 kids, what’s working in those 100,000 kids right now?

One of the things that have always been important to me is recognizing that you need to design with the community that you’re intending the tools to be used for. We partner with local organizations, particularly with schools that tend to be under-resourced.  How do we make sure that those kinds of things work for all children? Not just children who have access to science with tools in their homes, or they might have engineers in the family.

One of the things we do, for example, is we run The Tech Challenge. It is the longest-running engineering challenge in the country. That goes through twelve iterations before we even have kids participate in it. We make sure if it’s skewed a little bit more towards girls or boys, we keep adjusting and adjusting. We’re making sure that it feels deceptively simple so that all kids feel like they can do it, not just kids who have been working on robotics for the last ten years. That kind of community co-development makes things that are much more attractive and that kids are more successful in.

I’ll give you another example. We created something called a social robot. When we were doing all of our prototyping, we were using Legos for things. When boys saw wheels, they made them into trucks and cars. When girls saw the wheels, they just disengaged. Now, when you come in and you see our social robots, you can’t see the wheels of the base. We have to be able to wheel it around, but it’s covered so it’s skirted. These small kinds of interventions make a difference in terms of who will engage with those activities and those resources.

How are you measuring engagement when a girl is looking at those wheels and she’s not all that interested versus how the boys acted?

In the prototype, we watched. You can see it happen in real-time. Once we get to the stage where we have fully developed resources, we have different measures. We talk about how our body works around sparks. Kids need to have 8 to 12 interactions before they think about themselves differently with STEM.

Is spark an acronym?

No. We talk about igniting that spark. It’s a frame that we use around coming to The Tech and seeing our Tiktok videos. These are small engagements, where you see people that look like you doing science and creating technology, and doing things that are fun and exciting. Young people then start to think, “Maybe I could do that.” A lot of kids don’t naturally have that inclination, especially if they haven’t had engineers in their family.

We have another group of work that’s about skills and confidence building. Those are longer engagements, like the Tech Challenge, and the lessons that we create for school. The last piece that we do is STEM Career Pathways, we measure each of those differently. For spark, that’s about how many kids are involved and participate in a program. With our skills and confidence, we do pre and post-tests. We’ve had outside researchers come in to look and see and tell us what parts of their mindset or what skills are they developing. This idea of measurement is built into the work that we do.

What has responded well for the kids that you are seeing regularly? Talk me through the system of education that you’re presenting to them. I feel like right now there are a lot of different modes of education. You have the classroom model which is people sitting in front of a classroom and learning from a teacher in the front of the room. Honestly, with the advent of the internet, Zoom, and all these things, you have the online model which is us interacting with the screen, then you have other things that are available. What strategy do you feel is the most effective right now?

It’s a great question. That’s one that I have been talking to colleagues about. We don’t do a great job in education around dosage and matching. Meaning that there are times when it makes complete sense for a teacher to be sitting in a classroom, and having a conversation with kids, and that’s the best way to learn a particular concept. There are times when difficult concepts get to micro and macro. It’s hard to wrap your head around how large or small something is. Those are places where our immersive VR environments can be super helpful.

There isn’t one answer to how one should learn. We should be thinking about how we’re matching what that concept is with the best way to deliver that. Our methodology is based on project-based and problem-solving. It’s essentially engineering skillsets. How do you try something and iterate on it? The idea is that failures are completely part of the process. All of our activities are hands-on. They might use technology but the core of them is hands-on.

 

 

I’ll give you an example. We just got back from Kenya, and so we launched our Tech Challenge in Kenya. It’s the first time we’ve done a showcase outside of Silicon Valley. We had over 750 kids from a town called Nakuru. They had never in their entire education careers worked in a team before. Their education system is structured. If you’re doing a team activity with 100 kids together on a play or 100 kids on us in a sport. They had to learn how to work together, how to collaborate, and how to communicate. They talked about that a lot.

For the teachers, it’s huge to let go of that sage on the stage and allow kids to be able to try things on their own. We spent the first half of the year training the teachers, and then we spent about a quarter of the year doing small challenges to build up capacity and confidence. These kids then did this flight challenge and it was amazing the change and excitement that you could see in kids. They come in and test a device on a rig. They get interviewed by judges and they keep science journals that are also judged. Kids then can go into the categories.

The kids talked about it, particularly the girls. They never thought of themselves becoming Engineers ever. The shift in their heads was around, “I could do this.” There was a young woman that I interviewed. Her device didn’t work that day. She tested it on the day before and it worked. It didn’t that day and she said, “Normally, I would be crying and embarrassed and I would be over in a corner hiding. I learned that it was okay. My teammates understood and were supportive, and it’s okay for things to not work all the time.” By the end of the conversation, she’s like, “I’m going to be a CEO someday.” That confidence and understanding that it’s okay to fail which was not part of the culture in Kenya’s education system made that difference. Those are the moments where I feel like this is why we do what we do.

That sounds powerful. I hope that everyone has an experience like that. That’s like a subjective measurement. I know that’s true that a person learned this new skill, but are there any objective measurements to convince someone that objectively, these people are learning more from this model versus that model? I feel like what you’re promoting is a functional model where people get in there, get involved, and use those concepts on a real-world basis. I suppose what you said was sage on a stage. Are there any objective measurements to prove your model is better than the other model?

I’m glad you asked me that question, Dr. Awesome. I’ll tell you about a few of them, but that particular work that we didn’t Kenya. There was a trustee of the school who felt like doing this was taking away from teaching and learning time, and was very wary of doing any of this. I went back and looked at the first semester’s grades. They went up 15% across all content areas, not even just science. There was a tangible marker around the kids engaging in school differently and learning differently.

The idea of mindsets though is a tricky thing. Meaning, how do you measure mindset? That’s something we look at here in the US quite a bit. How do you measure growth mindset, for example? When I was at Chan Zuckerberg, we were investing in creating measures to try to more accurately capture that. A lot of times, we measure the things that are easy to measure. It’s easy to measure whether or not a student has mastered addition and subtraction, but it’s harder to measure. Are they comfortable with failure? Are they able to grow? All of those kinds of mindsets.

We usually measure whether students have mastered addition and subtraction. However, we don’t measure their level of comfort with failure or how they determine success in life.

We know what determines a lot of success in life. We’re getting better as an industry with different kinds of measures that you can use. We’re fortunate that some of our schools use those that we partner with. We partner with ten districts locally. We’ve been able to measure some of those mindsets, particularly around this STEM identity that we have been able to measure again, and that growth mindset. There’s a lot of work going on right now around how to do those. The tricky part is how do you make sure that those measures are measuring things similarly for all kids.

For example, there’s a lot of work that has been done by a colleague of mine around grit. That idea of persistence is incredibly important in terms of success in school and life. Some of the early measures had kids who were coming from more challenged areas as being seen as not having grit. Clearly, they do. It takes grit to survive sometimes in some of these environments and to be successful. We had to go back and redo those and recognize it’s not that the young person doesn’t have grit. It’s that what is being taught is not engaging in a way for them to have any reason to be able to persevere in that particular content. It’s tricky, but it is something that I feel like the industry is wrestling with right now.

When I think about all of the different things that are coming down the pipeline in regards to technology for any industry, like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and all these different things, I feel like the amount of rote memorization and even calculation. If I can easily get a calculation, does it necessarily need me to be in advanced math? Regardless, the point is that the majority of things that are going to be important are those character model outcomes that you’re talking about, like grit and perseverance. All of these different character traits are going to become more important in the workforce later on than just information.

I feel like information is going to be something that’s just a commodity in the future. Whereas the ability to do critical thinking and some of these soft things that you’re talking about that we can’t measure very well are going to be more significantly correlated with performance. Are there objective measurements for that, or is that something that’s still in the subjective realm?

 

 

There are some objective measures. Some good ones are out there. For example, you can measure perseverance by looking at how often a student will continue to try something. You can count on some of those. That’s an unsophisticated description of how that works, but we have been able to get more objective measures. You have to make sure they’re inclusively designed. That’s something that I talk a lot about with my team.

For example, there was a classic marshmallow test. The idea was that you give kids a marshmallow. They could either have one marshmallow now or they could have two later if they waited. That’s measuring whether or not someone can have delayed gratification. It turned out that when kids of color in particular were part of the experiment, they were more likely to eat the marshmallow. What people were looking at was that means those kids aren’t able to have that delayed gratification.

It turned out it made a huge difference in terms of who told them about the marshmallow. If they were interacting with someone that they trusted, particularly another person of color, they had an equal amount of ability to wait. That’s why you have to make sure that you’re testing the right things in these. That’s the part where you need more sophisticated tools than if you’re just measuring whether or not a kid has mastered their multiplication table.

I have a two-year-old and I’m trying to promote that in our own household. I don’t know how to do that though. Is there any way that you know like exercises you can do, even school-aged children, to promote their performance whether it’s perseverance or long-term thinking, whatever it is? Specifically, the outcome of the marshmallow study. Whatever it is that they’re trying to measure, are there any exercises that kids and parents can do at home to promote that quality?

There are, but the one thing I would caution is to make sure it’s developmentally appropriate. As the brain develops, there are stages where kids aren’t able to think about time in the same way. Two years old is young in terms of development and being able to grasp what that means. It’s the same thing when we talk about ethics. We often ask young people or kids to be more ethically oriented before they’re developmentally able to master some of those concepts. One is matching where a child is in their development with the right kinds of exercises.

Some of the things that I tell parents all the time is when kids say, “I don’t know how to do something,” and even some simple things like, “We don’t know how to do that yet,” just that simple reinforcement of the word “yet” gets the whole mind shift. If you’re repeating that over and over when kids are young, they start to develop that. It’s like, “I don’t know how to do it now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn.” The next thing is how you might get better at that and how you might find out that information.

That is so helpful. I never thought about that.

It’s super powerful. The other thing that I will advise parents and teachers is that oftentimes, we want to tell our kids, “You are so smart,” if we have a good kid who is doing well in math, “You’re good at math.” If you say that phrase, what happens is when they get older and they start to encounter math that is harder to learn, they shut down a little bit because it’s tied to their identity. Instead, if you say things like, “You’re a hard worker,” you’re pushing on the skills that go into learning, rather than just, “You’re a math person or you’re good at X.” That can change.

The more we repeatedly tell kids that they are smart at a particular subject, the more they will counter it when they get older.

I’ve seen this particularly with kids who excel well in academics and then they hit a stage, whether that’s middle school or college. Suddenly, they are confronted with something that is not easy to learn and everything has been easy before. If their identities are tied to the subject matter and being an A-student, it’s a lot harder for them to go, “Wait a second. I have a skillset. I know how to step back and be able to work through this. I can be able to learn this. It doesn’t have to naturally come to me.” That one is a little bit more sophisticated, but also something that can have a huge impact on how you talk to kids.

Side note. How do you feel about long-form podcasting as an educational tool? I feel like it’s something that as an adult, I find is such a powerful form, but for whatever reason, kids don’t want to be talked to for long amounts of time. What is the reasoning for that?

It is attention span. Younger kids have a much shorter attention span. It’s the frontal lobe part of your brain that takes a lot longer to develop. It’s a combination of developmental. Younger kids have a shorter attention span. It’s the same thing in the classroom. When I would design things with teachers, for elementary kids, you design things for 15 minutes. Whereas in high school, you can design something for 90 minutes. You don’t have to keep switching from topic to topic.

I hear you. The attention span, I totally get. Kids can play video games for hours on hours. They’re focusing their attention on this other thing for a long amount of time. If that’s the case, what’s the difference? Why specifically is it a conversation? I’m not even talking about long-form podcasting. I’m talking about having a long conversation with a child is difficult because they’re not interested in it. It’s not something that happens. You could sit with your best friend and have a three-hour-long conversation and the time just flies by. Kids don’t do that. What is the reason for that? They can focus their attention on the television for hours on it.

There’s the developmental difference. There’s that piece of it, but then also, our culture is teaching kids. TikTok videos that are 90 seconds are too long. How is that training on people? Humans have this natural wanting to have gratification. We’ve been training our society that that needs to come often in shorter bursts. The reason the video games work so well is they’re good at being able to give you one little step, and then you get a prize.

You’re constantly getting these dopamine hits where something fun is happening or something new. That newness keeps the brain engaged. It’s incredibly important that we teach young people and have them in activities where they’re not on tech. They are learning to focus and concentrate on things. They are more intentional than we used to, given how completely encompassed they are in tech.

 

 

I’m glad you brought the dopamine reward system up because I feel like there is this focus on things like consumer electronics and any stuff that you buy. They focus on the dopamine receptors. Is education also focusing on that? Why can’t we use the same tools that they use to make kids know their timetables faster?

Some of that does happen. I’m laughing because it’s an interesting dilemma in education. Certain kinds of learning activities make a lot of sense. Things that are rote memorization are not particularly fun naturally. The multiplication table is a good one. Teachers for a long time have been using it. Even in pre-tech, you get a star. You do races in class for how fast you can get through particular worksheets. Teachers have always been using some of that. What we also know is that there are other kinds of learning that you don’t want to do that for.

There was another famous experiment where kids were put in rooms doing puzzles. When the kids got prizes for the puzzle, the next time they went into a room with puzzles, they didn’t engage with the puzzle. They engage in other activities. Kids who didn’t get prizes for them would continue to do it. There’s an intrinsic learning piece around that intrinsic motivation that you want to make sure that we’re not losing. I talk about sometimes that you might win the battle, but you lose the war. If you do so much repetition with kids, then learning becomes less fun. They might master that particular thing, but they’ve given up on learning.

You even got a little one. The little ones are curious about the whole world. They go through elementary school pretty much still in that mode. As they hit middle school development, it starts to shift. The brain naturally starts to shift to becoming more social. It’s also some of how we’re teaching. If we keep the fun and play in teaching and learning, we come into the world that’s wanting to learn. That’s how we master language and everything. There are things we could be doing in our education system that are shifting that.

The reason why I asked that is because there is a sentiment running on social media right now that the Chinese version of TikTok is filled with science videos with motivational things, and things that are meant to grow these skills that are possible, and kids are on it for a long time. Theoretically, there’s this compensatory increase in those skills. However, right now in America, the exact opposite is true. It’s usually non-educational stuff that rises to the forefront.

There’s a difference in countries using the dopamine reward system to give special education or increased education to a child so that they digest it easier. In the same vein, are there any other countries that are doing interesting things? It doesn’t have to be the dopamine reward center. Are there any other countries that are doing interesting things that that’s the future of education right there?

I want to pause before going there too. We have had success in TikTok, surprisingly. We have these longer-form videos that highlight folks around the world who use technology for good. We take and cut them into smaller segments and put them on TikTok. We had over 200,000 interactions with one of our videos that had to do with poverty and data science. Kids will engage and it was not the one we expected to take off. We had one that had to do with animals and using AI to identify particular species, but no. If we give them that content, they will engage. It was pretty phenomenal. They were having the same kinds of conversations that you would expect to have in a classroom. We can use the tools. We’re just not doing it to the degree that we could.

I just got back from a conference in London that was looking at the future of ed tech. I got to hear some cool examples. One that I thought was fascinating was this idea of leapfrogging technology. In small villages throughout the African continent, they’re using VR, but it’s not attached to the internet. The beekeeping, for example. They’re going into villages using the headsets that are teaching people in villages how to keep bees or other kinds of skills. These are interesting phenomena. Folks are super excited and it’s changing what’s happening in villages.

There are ways to use technology even in places that don’t have the structure or that setup. There’s one that makes me nervous. China does this where they’re monitoring kids’ eyes and equating that with attention span. That one makes me nervous because we don’t actually know what’s going on in the brain. They might be engaged in something else is happening. I worry a little bit about what reflection might be attached to that and what that does, but we’re going there. I’m seeing twinning where people are creating twin cities so that you’re able to run experiments and figure out how people are going to interact and behave.

One of the places I see on the teacher training side is a huge move towards being able to use VR. There are other kinds of immersion technology where you get to practice in a classroom before you have real kids that are in front of you. I see that being a place that we’re going. I also am seeing a huge shift in other countries, and we’re going there. You raised this before. Most people in their lives will not use Calculus, yet Calculus is a barrier to kids’ entry into a lot of programs in colleges. Data science or even Statistics is much more useful in the long term.

You can teach some of the basic concepts in Calculus, but you don’t actually need to know how to calculate all of that. We spend a lot of time trying to convince kids how to learn those skills and they will never use them. I think there’s a revision that needs to happen in the US that I’m seeing in other countries where they’re looking at what truly are the skills that folks are going to need ten years from now, rather than, “We’ve been doing this way for the last 100 years. We need to continue to do that.” That’s a place where I’m seeing it.

Most people will never use calculus in their lives, whereas data science and statistics are more useful in the long-term.

I also was on a panel. In the panel after me, there was someone who literally was a hologram from another part of the world, interacting with all of us. That’s phenomenal. We have university students at the University of Silicon Valley who are creating an AI for our lobby. Each new set of kids coming in each semester creates another set. It’s a bound system. We’re introducing it. We’re going to come in and ask, “What exhibit should I see? I like this,” or where the bathrooms are. It will get smarter and smarter as each of the sets of students is involved in creating it. Fun things are happening in the world.

These technologies are coming, whether it’s to ed tech, medicine, dairy farming, or whatever it is. Virtual reality, holograms, and artificial intelligence, these technologies are going to affect multiple different industries. Education is going to be one of them. I do feel like you have a unique insight into where the education system is right now. If you had to choose one model, which country is doing it best, would you say?

Everyone points to Finland all the time in terms of having the best outcomes. Part of why that is so successful is that teachers are given a different kind of training. They get a lot of training on how learning works. Our teachers in the US get very minimal. We’ve made huge advances in the last 10 to 20 years around understanding how the brain works, but that is not ending up in any of our teacher prep programs, or many of them. There’s a combination of Finland teachers being able to get that skill and them having up to twenty hours a week where they get to design what they are teaching kids.

You see over time a shift where we have teachers doing what they do well, which is that relationship building and understanding what individual children need. Technology can help with all those administrative tasks that we don’t need teachers to be doing, for them to be able to get information from how kids did the night before so they can redesign and re-shift who’s learning what the next day. That’s the skillset that teachers can have. In Finland, teachers have more time to be able to do that. You have to be thoughtful about how to provide what kids need.

The other places are Australia and New Zealand. Those are some of the folks who are using ed tech smartly and thoughtfully. Singapore is another place that gets good outcomes. All of those involve a mix of using technology in places where it’s helpful, not as a replacement for a teacher. It’s a shift from the idea of the teacher in front of the classroom talking. It’s where the teacher becomes more of a coach. The technology allows teachers to be able to shift and personalize for each of the kids. That’s where you’re seeing the real advances.

That’s interesting to me because the information is going to become a commodity. A coach telling a kid, “This is how you get the best information. This is how you apply the information the best,” or that kind of stuff, first off, that’s never going to go away. Coaching is inherent in literally every industry. You learn from someone who understands the system better than you do. The information is always going to change. Even in my field of medicine, everything is outdated after a few years. I’m sure it’s probably the same thing in education too. Anyway, that’s an interesting concept, the idea of coaching to the information. Is there any country that’s doing that?

It’s rarely a full country. It’s usually more like there’s a district that’s doing it well in other parts of the world as well. The US is so decentralized. We’ve got 15,000 districts that each get to make decisions on themselves about how they want to teach, where they want to put their funding, and all of that. It’s very localized. For more decentralized countries, China is an interesting one. I was responsible for the national education technology plan. My team was trying to get folks to adopt it and look at it. I deal with 50 states, 15,000 districts, and then the schools on top of them. China took it and implemented it. It’s crazy.

Everybody has that friend who just copies your work.

I think that’s how that happens. That’s good to know.

How is it working in China? How long has it been implemented?

Maybe seven years at this point.

It’s been around for a while. How are they dealing with it?

There’s a lot of shift. Technology is being integrated. They’re investing in technology.

How did the US do regarding those implementations?

I worked on a project called Future Ready, which came out of Obama’s office around ConnectED. It’s essentially getting kids online, and making sure that all schools have broadband access. Once you have it, what do you do with it? How do you change how you’re teaching and learning? Just because you have broadband coming to your school doesn’t mean you know how to use that. I worked with over 3,000 districts and superintendents who signed this pledge and then went through a lot of training and resources.

When COVID hit, I got emails from some of those folks because they were ready. They had the infrastructure. There are still decisions they had to make to get everybody online, and fully online is a very different model. Those folks understood how to use technology. They had the infrastructure. Their teachers were comfortable, and they were able to switch within a week or two. They were able to get everything online. We’re seeing schools that never had that are really struggling.

We had worked with a lot of the schools as part of Future Ready around those kids who don’t have access at home. For example, you can have the tech go home, but not have to be on the internet while it’s working. It’s these things around troubleshooting. They were able to help where they already had sent devices home with kids that came with the internet. Making sure that there was universal access for kids. It was very uneven in the US, but some States adopted it and are now doing some interesting work.

What are the outcomes for a fully online model versus either a hybrid model or an in-person model? The information that we got from COVID, a lot of the school systems went completely virtual. What are the outcomes in comparison to regular schooling and the hybrid?

The numbers across the United States went way down. Collectively, if you look at our scores in Math and English, Math in particular went way down. Part of that, some schools literally weren’t ready. Some of those scores are account for things that not necessarily the teaching and learning model. There are things like suddenly kids were home alone because their parents had to go and work in an office. Kids didn’t have any childcare access to food. A lot of kids got their food through school. There are a lot of other social factors that impact how kids show up for these kinds of testing.

The most successful ones are often the hybrid ones where you had some relationship with the teacher and with your peers. This is true even in the workplace. Once you’ve met somebody in person, the next time you’re interacting with them in a hybrid environment, you have a different relationship and a different connection. Those programs were often the most successful.

If you meet somebody in person and then interact with them in a hybrid environment, you will have a different relationship.

Technology itself is just a tool. If a teacher sat up in the classroom and still lectured you on Zoom, then that’s no different than being lectured in a classroom. If a teacher is using like, “There’s these cool creation tools. I want you to go learn about Zebra, and then I want you to share with me in a short video what we learned.” That’s when you’re using technology for creation and collaboration. That tended to happen more in more wealthy districts.

How did the wealthy districts that were using the internet-only model to the best of their ability compare to outcomes in the past or current outcomes?

There were some children across the US who excelled in these environments. Some kids are generally self-driven or interested in things like computer science where you can go as fast and as far as you want if you’re online. The thing you’re learning does well with that particular mode. Some kids never came back. This model worked for them to be collaborating online and just to be at home. A lot of other kids did not need that social interaction with one another. One of the things that we heard from our teachers, and we saw it in field trips after the pandemic. Kids didn’t know how to behave in the school setting. They weren’t able to manage themselves. We saw that teachers all over the US are talking about that.

There are other things that school does beyond the math piece. There’s also, how do you work with people? How do you manage yourself and show up? Those things, you still need to have some interactions for. There were other countries where it did much better. I was part of a group called Global Group Around the Science of Learning. We saw examples in other places in the world where schools did almost equally as well. It’s possible for that to be able to work that way.

I hope that is the case because I do feel like some kids would benefit from an internet-only model. I think that there are also benefits of having a kid come into a classroom and interact with children and all that stuff. The idea for me for learning is that there should be multiple different ways to do it. I like the fact that that option is still around. That honestly is something that only happened because of the pandemic. I don’t think that would ever exist. There is homeschooling that’s completely online even before the pandemic. I remember there were a few kids in my high school who did that, and then they came and played for the soccer team. We never saw them during the day, but they would come for all of the events and stuff like that.

I know that exists and it’s nice to know that they have similar outcomes because I like the fact that option is available to them. My last question is specifically about interactions with artificial intelligence. Let’s say it’s a completely artificial intelligent tutor or teacher or whatever it is. Does that technology exist right now? Is anybody using that? Do you think those outcomes are going to be better or do you think that those outcomes are not going to be as good?

It’s a field we’re wrestling with right now. I go back to the idea of dosage. We need to pay attention to how much. For example, there’s a tool called mirror learning that does reading, testing, and speaking, then it also has a tutoring component to it. You’re on that for 45 minutes a day. One of the things that’s happening in China is allowing kids in rural areas to be able to get reading interventions that would not be available to them. They don’t have enough people to be able to go out to villages and do that kind of work. That can be life-changing for particular kids.

If you were with that avatar for 3 or 4 hours a day or the whole day, what we don’t know, especially when it’s for young kids, is whether it changes developmentally how the brain interacts with technology. Maybe you don’t do this, but when my GPS first came, I named it. As humans, we do this. We make things appear. I talk to my Roomba. They both have names, Upstairs and Downstairs. This is a human instinct. We need to be careful in making sure that we are measuring that because technology is here. It’s not going away. It has many ways that it can be super helpful. We need to make sure we’re paying attention to what does that mean about kids developing relationships with people. We want them to be able to make the distinction between the two. We don’t want that to get erased.

Kids working with an AI tutor are more likely to be comfortable making a mistake in interacting with them. There’s already some interesting research around how that can be used. When it’s an actual human, they want to be perfect, but they don’t feel the same way. If they’re helping an AI avatar learn something, that also allows them to learn better. There are some interesting nuances to this that I’ve seen.

Have you heard about Moxie, the little robot that teaches the kids? How do you feel about that?

Those are all great tools. The novelty factor often gets kids engaged in a way. As long as we’re monitoring that and we don’t completely replace a teacher. I think that relationship is huge in terms of what makes kids want to learn. We’re bringing more. Our mascot is a robot, and I told you we have AI that’s coming into our lobby. We’re talking about we have robots to deliver food in the cafeteria. It’s around teaching young people how to use a tool. I go back to when you were talking earlier about calculation.

I remember when there were arguments around whether or not we should allow calculators in schools, and now it’s required when you take your test. Kids aren’t going to be able to spell. It was similar to a grammar check. Kids aren’t going to be able to know their grammar, but you teach it at the same time as you roll out these tools. A spell check will tell you that your name is spelled wrong. You know your name is not spelled wrong. These are tools. You have to teach kids. They’re going to be good for these things, but you still have to have this extra thing.

The ChatGPT, we’re all talking about how this is getting used. A friend of mine did it, and it rolled out a resume. It did a bio for him. It got everything right, but it had him at Stanford instead of MIT and Harvard. You still have to check these things. These are tools and they can help you generate, but we need to make sure that young people understand what that technology is. Teach them the skills to be able to use it appropriately rather than just be like, “It knows the answer to everything.”

Specifically, in regards to Moxie, it’s super cute. It’s interactive. When you’re talking about dosage, I don’t know if this is an accurate thing that you guys have measured. Personally, at this age, I don’t feel like there’s a maximum dosage on learning. They’re learning so much. I feel like I could give her an IV full of learning and it could just drip at the highest setting available for 24 hours a day because that’s how much they’re able to take in right now. I wonder if that’s a bad thing.

Honestly, I don’t think it is a bad thing. The only way that we’re realistically going to be able to deliver kids the maximum amount of learning that they can tolerate is through artificial intelligence or some way of giving them information on a more rapid basis. When she’s just chilling and making pretend, I know that it’s helpful for her brain. Is she going to benefit more from having an interactive tutor who’s with her and says, “Instead of playing make-believe with this color, why don’t you play with this color?” All sorts of different things that it knows will help her as opposed to her just doing it by herself.

I would push back a little bit on that. Talk about dosage. I actually think you can learn all the time. The question is, “What kinds of tools are the best?” How much of that should be AI? How much of that should be hands-on learning?” Especially, with young children, you know that from your medical background. The body needs to move and grow. Making sure that you’re interacting with things with your hands is still critically important.

Adults do this with young kids. When you’re learning, you’re asking kids questions all the time. As they’re interacting with the world, they’re doing that. The brain also needs to rest. The other thing I tell teachers and parents is sleep is super important. Make sure your kids get sleep. That is a time when the brain prunes what it learns that day. It files things away that it needs to be able to know. The same thing is true when you’re learning. Your brain needs to have little breaks because it takes that time, files, and organizes it.

When you are learning, your brain needs little breaks. It must have time to take in, file, and organize information.

There’s even research on people that if you have a five-minute break in between your meetings, you’re much more productive in the next meeting. Short breaks can be incredibly important. Making sure that kids can freely play and not have all of that be structured is super important. It develops different kinds of learning skills.

The ideas that you’re presenting are interesting. It’s something that I feel like I always wish that I had somebody to talk to you about. Thank you for appearing on the show. The time is close to being done. At the end of my show, I always ask all of the guests three questions. The first of which is always, where do you gain inspiration from? For me, it’s science fiction. I feel like that idea of a utopian society and a lot of the science fiction that’s out there gives me a hopeful view of the future. It gets me excited to hear about things like robots and artificial intelligence as you’re talking about at your museum. What about you? What is your inspiration for what you do every day?

It’s a good question. I love science fiction and fantasy as well because you can see things play out. I love going back and watching old Star Trek and seeing we have all those things now. That part is fun. Also, in reading. Honestly, the place that makes me the most optimistic and inspired is kids. When you let them loose, they are so creative.

What is interesting is when I was talking about that tech challenge, young kids actually come up with more clever solutions sometimes. No one has told them something doesn’t work. They are super creative. I see what they can do and I see how they care about what’s happening in the world. We’re trying to give them the tools so they can have the tools to be able to both create and imagine, but also to help us with some of the challenges that we have in the world. Young people are who I look up to. They’re the ones that when I’m having a rough day, I listen to them like, “I never would’ve thought of doing it that way. That’s pretty amazing.” They’re the ones who are designing our future, so they make me excited.

 

 

Second question. You’re in charge of a science museum across the US. What are some of your personal favorite science museums? I live in Boston. We have a Museum of Science, just a few blocks from where I live. Let’s say the top five. You had to limit it to five of your favorite science museums.

The guy who used to run The Tech before me is the director of the Museum of Science in Boston. We have a good relationship with them. It’s a great museum. Also the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. I would have to say The Tech. Some of them are classics like The Franklin Institute. I love the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh. They’re always cutting edge and ahead of it. When I think about the world, the Museum of the Future in Dubai is intriguing.

I got to go there.

There’s this huge robot that greets you. It’s a robot dog that greets you on the front. They’re doing some cutting-edge things.

That’s nice to know. Where do you see us in ten years? Are we going to have a totally different classroom? Let’s even push it further back to twenty years. Is the concept of the classroom going to go away? What do you see the idea of the classroom and education being in twenty years?

When I was at Chan Zuckerberg, we thought about that. What do we need to do now to get us ready for twenty years from now? I’d love to say that we’re getting rid of classrooms and that we have a whole new structure, but I’ve been saying that for the last 20 to 30 years. Until schools are also childcare, it’s going to be hard to have a huge shift on that front. I do think that schools will be significantly more personalized where kids are getting content that is delivered to them in ways that meet their interests, and meet where they are in terms of what they’ve learned and whatnot. Help them fill gaps and be able to pursue things that they’re excited about.

Schools will most likely be more personalized in the future. Information will be delivered to kids in ways that meet their interests and where they are in terms of what they have learned.

We have a much more personalized system. We’re going to know a lot more about individual kids, and be able to have the delivery systems for them. You see some schools that are doing this though. We will have some hybrid schools and places where you’re not going to a brick-and-mortar building. These experiments already exist. I’m not sure if we’re ever going to get to be able to do that large-scale where all kids will be able to participate. I do see us having significantly more AR. I’m fascinated with virtuality, but AR or Augmented Reality is going to have a much bigger effect in schools in K12 education than VR will. Layering technology on top of what you’re already learning is going to be one of the things that will happen in the future.

I’m excited to see Apple’s VR set because I feel like that’s something that’s going to introduce VR to the masses. Everybody is going to want to be on this thing. It was so nice speaking with you. Katrina, I would love to have you on again. We had an interesting conversation. For those of you who are tuning in from the comfort of your house, or watching us on YouTube, please like and subscribe. For everyone who’s out there, I will see you in the future. Have a great day, everybody.

Thank you.

 

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About Katrina Stevens

Katrina Stevens is the fourth president and CEO of The Tech. As an educator, administrator, advisor and policymaker, she has focused on ways to create inspirational and impactful learning experiences for young people around the world.

Before joining The Tech, Stevens was the director of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she sought opportunities to improve learning, especially for young people who face the most serious obstacles to success. There, she oversaw a $200 million portfolio of 67 grants.

Among the projects Stevens led were grants to PBS Kids to develop infrastructure to better measure the impact of its educational programming and to EF+Math, which uses an inclusive R&D approach prioritizing the voices and lived experiences of those the program aims to serve, and the e2i Coach, which helps schools understand what practices and tools work for whom in what context. She also helped fund the creation of 100 open-source Next Generation Science Standards assessments in physical science.

In 2014 Stevens was appointed by the Obama Administration to serve as the deputy director and senior adviser in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, where she led the Future Ready Schools movement to help district leaders implement best practices in digital learning, as well as overseeing education innovation clusters, rapid cycle evaluations, developer outreach, and the National Education Technology Plan.

Katrina also served as the co-founder of the University of Virginia’s Edtech Education Exchange and was the founding entrepreneur-in-residence for JFF Labs, EdSurge Summit Director, and the founding Executive Director of EdTech Maryland.

Before her time in government, Stevens worked as an educator, including roles as a classroom teacher, department chair, program director and interdisciplinary curriculum leader. She worked in the central office in Baltimore County Public Schools and spent three years with the Ministry of Education in Bermuda for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, launching a lab school and gifted program for students from across the island. She also wrote about the educational technology sector as a journalist for Edsurge, and co-founded #edtechchat, the first Twitter chat for education technology. Throughout her career, she has consulted with a wide range of education startups, foundations and nonprofits and served on multiple boards and advisories.

Stevens is the first educator and first woman to lead The Tech. She is deeply committed to equity and to ensuring The Tech helps to diversify the STEM workforce to ensure people from all backgrounds play a role in the development of technology.

A magna cum laude graduate of Temple University, Stevens has a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in English literature and composition. She loves to hike, is passionate about otters, enjoys baking and writing, and is a fan of “So You Think You Can Dance.” She grew up in Chambersburg, Pa., and lives in San Carlos with her partner, Chip, and their Covid rescue dog, Clover.